Wow! What a week...or part of a week. Windows PowerShell Summit North America 2015 was here in Charlotte, NC this past week. It was three days of deep dive learning about PowerShell 5.0

I meet all the big names in PowerShell scripting. Jeffrey Snover, Jeffery Hicks, Don Jones, Ed Wilson, Lee Holmes, Jim Christopher and Jason Helmick. These guys really have it together and are making some great strides in using PowerShell and the new features in PowerShell 5.0 Preview.

Plus I learned a whole lot about PowerShell. I discovered better ways to organize my scripts using Modules and Functions. It seem obvious now, but the summit brought all that knowledge into my face.

Some of the other exciting news was. The PowerShell Gallery is an open source PowerShell scripts and modules that can provide more tools to your tool bag. The PowerShellGallery and GitHub are open source repository for building new scripts. Your scripts can submitted and vetted by Microsoft and if they meet right stuff, the scripts can be part of the PowerShell Gallery.

It's been around since PowerShell 4.0, but I finally got a handle on what DSC (Desired State Configuration) and how it can help me do my job. DSC basically is a file of attributes that you system needs and if something changes it can put it back. For example, let's assume that your IIS has application pools are configure to use a service account and the service account is disable or changed. The DSC will set it back.

I also found a few skills PowerShell user that have configured DSC to install software. It's very powerful and the new release will have even more.

The three day PowerShell Summit was well worth the time and money and look forward to attending next year in Redmond.